| Chapter The 237th, the chapter that turned around and found that they were all wearing eyepatches. |
Plot:
The Doctor and Liz are working at a government funded scientific project centre run by the single-minded, driven and downright rude Professor Stahlman. Stahlman doesn't want the Doctor or Liz as advisers, so they are mainly doing their own research - experimenting to get the TARDIS console working again using the centre's nuclear power supply. Stahlman plans to penetrate the Earth's crust to release a powerful gas that can be used for the UK's energy needs, the ultimate in fracking. It gets even more fracking intriguing though when there are some unexplained deaths, and the Brig and UNIT are brought in to investigate. A green goo leaks out of the drill-head, and if it touches a human's skin they begin to transform into a wolfman-like creature called a Primord. Stahlman gets a tiny bit on his hand and gets even more single-minded and rude, pushing everything beyond safety limits to get to the crust penetration point as soon as possible. An energy surge sends the Doctor, the console and his car into a parallel dimension where the drilling is further along. The UK is a fascist republic, and there are aggressive alternative versions of the Doctor's friends (Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, Section Leader Liz Shaw, and Platoon Under Leader Benton) and the other people working on the project. The drill penetrates the Earth's crust, explosions and earthquakes ensue, and most of the staff flee; alt-Stahlman, alt-Benton and a number of soldiers turn into Primords but the Doctor and the others escape. The Doctor tells them it is too late to save their world, but they can help him return to his universe and save Earth there. They work together to do this, but when the time comes for the Doctor to return, the Brigade Leader tries to force the Doctor to take them with him. Alt-Liz shoots alt-Brig, and the Doctor returns. The real world Stahlman goes full wolfman, and everyone else helps to stop the countdown just in time.
Context:
It's old and it's seven episodes long, so I did not even consider trying to interest any of the family in watching it with me. The plan was to watch the special edition DVD version one episode a day over the course of a week. I managed this for a couple of days for episodes one and two, but then on the third day I just watched all the remaining five episodes one after the other, such is the high quality of Inferno. Family members occasionally came in the room, but nobody stuck around nor commented.
First Time Round:
This story was one of the very first I ever watched on a fan-exchanged nth generation video. Not quite a pirated video, as Inferno wasn't commercially available at the time (late 1991), but a recording from Australian television from when the story had been repeated there. Burnt onto the tape forever was the continuity announcer coming in over the credits at the end of episode one talking about how the "green man" would be back next time, and talking about the many items of Doctor Who merchandise available at the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) shop in Sydney "But probably not a green man". My memory stubbornly tells me that the serial was in black and white, but it can't have been as those comments wouldn't make any sense (although Slocombe, the poor fellow revealed at the first cliffhanger who's changing into a Primord, looks more blue than green). I'm probably getting it confused with The Daemons that I saw at the same time, that version of which was definitely monochrome. The two stories had been given to me on tape by David, fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog. We'd met a couple of months earlier in my first week at Durham University, when I barged into his room rudely on hearing Doctor Who playing therein (see the First Time Round section of the The Daemons blog post for more details). He'd very nicely loaned me a few tapes to take home with me to watch over the Christmas break.
I must have been particularly taken with Inferno, as I did a viewing with a larger group of student mates on a Sunday when back in Durham the next January, in Mike's room (he was the only one of my immediate peer group with a single room and a VCR). My memory is though that some of the assembled, a group who were less die-hard fans than me or David, weren't that enamoured of the story, and found some aspects of it laughable. Not the scene one might think either (where many characters turn into wolfmen with very obvious joke shop fake teeth), but what I considered to be good dramatic bits. As the story is quite long, we had to break off in the middle for lunch in the college canteen, and I remember an argument taking place over that meal where I tried to explain the limitations within which Doctor Who of this era was made (every fan probably has been through something like this, I'm sure). One other strong memory I have of watching this story was from many years later when it first came out on DVD. My eldest child had just been born, but was kept in the hospital with his Mum as he was a little sickly. I was on my own in the house, unable to stay with them. Catching up on the extras before I went to bed, I listened to Sergeant Benton actor John Levene's solo commentary on one of the episodes, and it seemed to me that all he was doing was chorusing the names of the various cast and crew that were no longer with us. In that moment, late of an evening, feeling lonely and missing the Better Half and my tiny newborn child, I suddenly felt very down, almost tearful. Despite it causing at least one argument and another moment of existential angst, the story remained and remains a firm favourite of mine.
Reaction:
There's no point dancing around the point, this is going to be a bit of a rave; Inferno is one of my top ten (probably top five) Doctor Who stories. Of course, if anyone actually asked me to compile that chart I'd go through a procession of agonies, and stories would be in or out, there'd be many a longlist and shortlist scribbled and scratched out, and many pencil tops chewed. Suffice to say, it felt like one of my top five at the time of watching, and - as any Doctor Who fan re-watching episodes they have happy memories of from long ago could tell you - that's by no means ever guaranteed. The first great thing that the story has going for it is the premise. Having inherited from the previous production team the arc narrative of the Doctor as exiled and trapped on Earth, Terrance Dicks - script editor during the Pertwee years - thereafter often moaned in interviews that it restricted the types of stories that could be told by his writers, one joking comment was that all that was left was alien invasion and mad scientist stories. The middle two of the four stories broadcast in Pertwee's first year pulled away from this, endeavouring to do something different (the creatures aren't invading as they've always lived here, the aliens that look like they're invading are goodies being manipulated by humans). The first and last stories lean more in to it, and give perhaps the best alien invasion in opening story Spearhead from Space, and the final word on mad scientists in the last story, Inferno. In some ways, this season finale is another version of a favourite template from Patrick Troughton's time, where a scientific base led by an unstable, driven man (it's always a man) is threatened by destructive forces. With the focus on the mechanics of drilling and bodily transformation of humans coming under the influence of a malign force, Inferno bears many similarities to Fury from the Deep from two years earlier. It's so much better than that earlier story, though (and Fury from the Deep isn't exactly a clunker).
The parallel universe aspect of the story is the little touch of genius that pushes Inferno from being very good to being excellent. It's the most interesting method of padding out a story anyone could think of, as the same events can be played out twice and yet not be a cheat. The moment in the final episode where the Doctor knows that the number two output pipe has blown, as he's seen it happen before and what the consequences will be, is exciting because we as the audience want things to turn out differently this time around. There's a bit of fun to be had too with the 1984-style trappings - pictures of the great leader with the slogan UNITY IS STRENGTH - and there's possibly the greatest interrogation scene in the whole of Doctor Who, as the nasty versions of the regular cast give the Doctor a grim going over. Overall, the parallel universe subplot is so successful that it's a wonder that Doctor Who didn't do such a thing more often (see Deeper Thoughts for more details). The biggest boon it gives the story is the opportunity for most of the actors to give their all in two linked but contrasting roles each; they all - regular and guest cast alike - rise to this challenge. Best of all of these is an astonishing performance and one of the best given by anyone in Doctor Who, classic or new series, Nicholas Courtney's turn as the Brigade Leader. He expertly calibrates the gradual rising panic of a bully out of his depth, as everything that gave him power and protection is stripped away. It's a joy to watch. As the stalwart hero, Pertwee gets much less interesting material by comparison, but he's nonetheless excellent too.
Everyone's giving their all behind the camera too. Director Douglas Camfield's film work is possibly his best ever here. The location (the Kingsnorth Industrial estate standing in for the Inferno project research centre) is a gift, with impressive high structures and gantries, to all of which the crew were given access quicker than you can say "Health and Safety wasn't invented yet"! Camfield exploits this for all it's worth, and creates some great action sequences with the stuntmen of the Havoc team, including the fantastic fall done by Roy Scammell from the top of a cooling tower. Another good filmed sequence is the set of trippy shots of manipulated reflected images of the Doctor as he travels between dimensions. Studio work is great too, though it came at a cost to Camfield who had a minor heart attack halfway through (producer Barry Letts took over and followed Camfield's notes, achieving a seamless join). There's a palpable atmosphere of heat, sweat and terror achieved. The script has some great dialogue ("But I don't exist in your world!" "Then you won't feel the bullets when we shoot you", "That's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!" and many more examples). There's the first signs here of the evolution of the Pertwee stories from the harder, grounded professional approach to the more family-like atmosphere of the later years, with Sergeant Benton joshing with the Doctor and the Brigadier, and the Scooby-Doo everybody laugh comedy ending where the Doctor gets the TARDIS working but only sufficiently to deposit him onto the nearest rubbish tip. There's something for everyone, with even a little love story subplot between the characters of Petra and Greg. With only that tiny dodgy make-up effect mentioned in the First Time Round section above as a black mark (and it's the tiniest of moments), this truly seems like one of the best stories in Doctor Who's long history.
Connectivity:
Both stories feature characters being influenced by forces from deep beneath the Earth's surface, and climax with a volcanic eruption that kills off most of the guest cast.
Deeper Thoughts:
The strange Doctor and the madness of multiverses. Doctor Who doesn't do parallel universe stories very often. This would be more surprising if it were a time travel show, but it isn't for the most part. It mainly just uses time travel to efficiently create a succession of different settings and genres, acting more like an anthology of tales linked only by the regular cast using the magic door of the TARDIS to step into a new adventure every few weeks. It took a full year after the series began in 1963 for the focus to cease to be just on exploration / escape and to move more towards 'good versus evil' tales. It was obviously going to take even longer before the scripts properly explored the internal mechanisms of time travel, and even longer before they covered something relatively obscure like using multiverse theory in a science fiction scenario. Relatively obscure as it was back then in Doctor Who's classic years, I mean; at the time of writing this in August 2022, multiverse theory is popular and is used for the plots of blockbuster movies. A lot of this does seem to just be about casting, though. If Marvel Studios want to have some fun and serve their fans by featuring actors that may have played a famous superhero or supervillain role some time in the past, or for a different movie company, then parallel dimensions are a rich seam to mine for those alt-versions. That Doctor Who never had to resort to such methods is testament to one of its better original concepts, regeneration. The main role is recast without interrupting the flow of the overarching narrative, so if - just as a hypothetical example, you understand - it was desired to unite three actors who'd played the lead role at different times in the programme's history, it could be done easily using the standard basic time travel conventions of the show without any extra effort to create whole new universes. If - if - Marvel ever wanted to do the same without jumping through such narrative hoops, there'd just be no way, homie.
Without that meta-textual reason for a parallel universe story, there are probably three main textual reasons. First, to allow for dark reflections, for the audience interest - as well as actor challenge - of presenting evil versions of heroic characters; for example, the original series Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror presented a few of the regulars' villainous alternatives, including a memorably bearded Spock. Generally, if Doctor Who wanted to do this, it just made it a coincidence and moved on. Naughty characters the Abbot of Amboise and Salamander just happen to look like William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton respectively, they don't come from another reality. Inferno is the only exception to this rule in the classic series; as noted above, the regular and guest cast (with the exception of star Jon Pertwee who crosses from one dimension to the other and has no counterpart there) are great presenting fascist versions of themselves. Arguably, it isn't the main multiverse rationale of Inferno. The story uses the parallel universe excursion primarily for the second textual reason - to do what other stories flirt with but can never take all the way: to let the countdown reach zero and actually destroy the world. This then ups the stakes for the Doctor's home universe, when he returns there in the final episode with time to spare to avert the catastrophe. In this way, it acts as a glimpse into a potential future, which Doctor Who does much more often (for example when the TARDIS 'jumps a time track' and shows the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki a horrifying potential future in The Space Museum, or the Doctor showing the ravaged Earth if Sutekh isn't stopped in Pyramids of Mars). Technically these potential timelines come under the multiverse heading, but - in those examples - it isn't dwelt upon in the story, and may not have been thought of in that way by the authors.
The Toymaker's domain (in the Celestial Toymaker), the land of fiction (in The Mind Robber) and the dimension where the futuristic Arthurian knights come from (in Battlefield) are all different single options of universe within the multiverse choice, but they may as well just be any old weird planet that the TARDIS lands on as it does every other week. The UNIT stories of the period of Inferno technically all take place in an alternate reality anyway, where there's an advanced UK space programme and a BBC3. The third and final key textual reason for the use of the multiverse approach makes the differences more significant; this is the counter-factual, either personal or more usually political. Even here, Doctor Who seldom finds the need to play. One common example outside Who is the 'what if the Nazis had won' narrative. It's lightly sketched in, but this essentially seems to be the background of the parallel Earth in Inferno, where it's hinted that some Mosleyite faction has gained control of the UK, aligned with the Axis powers during WW2 (likely after these powers invaded), and made the country a republic, executing the royal family. I'm doing some imaginative heavy lifting there, but it's a more than plausible tying up of the hints on screen. The other major political counter-factual parallel universe Doctor Who story (The Rise of the Cyberman / The Age of Steel) is even more half-hearted, with only slight hints that there's been a shift to the totalitarian some time in the past. The more personal take on the counter-factual (how would a life be different if different choices were made) has been done in the new series years a couple of times in Father's Day and Turn Left, the latter acting much like a Doctor Who It's a Wonderful Life, showing the terrible state the world would be in if the Doctor hadn't been around. Maybe it's a good thing that the series doesn't do this kind of story very often as what unites all the times it did is that the alternative world presented either descends into fascism, or gets destroyed, or both. It would be nice if a potential present or future could be one that's better than what we have now (in life as well as in Doctor Who).
In Summary:
Inferno is so hot right now.
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